As a college student over 20 years ago, it was fashionable to identify as a person who voted ‘based on issues’ rather than based on party.
You probably know the idea. You didn’t just vote for a candidate because they ran as a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or Green. Rather, you looked carefully at their platform and voted for the person who ticked the right boxes.
Admittedly, we weren’t as clever as we thought. For leftists, the idea was to talk tough to Democrats. We said to them that we had certain issues we prioritized – health care, and so on – and we’d abandon the Democrats if they weren’t willing to fight for those issues. We announced our intention to vote for Ralph Nader – or an appropriate Nader equivalent – if Democrats failed to get with the program.
In practice, though, leftists rarely carried out the threat. Democrats repeatedly shunned universal health care. Most leftists continued voting for them anyway.
No doubt people at other points on the political map ran their own version of this. Centrists looked to candidate platforms to ward off ‘extremists.’ And right-wingers wanted to see the greatest hits of their own policy goals, lest they vote for some obscure right-wing third party. They didn’t carry out the threat, either, though they seemed to have more success at pushing their own views on party leaders.
